What does an Agile Team look like?

Thanks to some friends and colleagues at Rally for sharing this from Liz Keogh’s work.This is a great tool to use when trying to assess where a team is in their agile adoption. It be used as a guide for periodic retrospectives and even goal setting for teams looking to move to the next level as they grow as a team. Novice

We have a board

We put our stories on the board

Every two weeks, we get together and celebrate what we’ve done

Sometimes we talk to the stakeholders about it

We think we might miss our deadline and have told our PM

Agile is really hard to do well

Beginner

We are trying to deliver working software

We hold retrospectives to talk about what made us unhappy

When something doesn’t work, we ask our coach what to do about it

Our coach gives us good ideas

We have delegated someone to deal with our offshore communications

We have a great BA who talks to the stakeholders a lot

We know we’re going to miss our deadline; our PM is on it

Agile requires a great deal of discipline

Practitioner

We know that our software will work in production

Every two weeks, we show our working software to the stakeholders

We talk to the stakeholders about the next set of stories they wants us to do

We have established a realistic deadline and are happy that we’ll make it

We have some good ideas of our own

We deal with blockers promptly

We write unit tests

We write acceptance tests

We hold retrospectives to work out what stopped us delivering software

We always know what ‘done’ looks like before we start work

We love our offshore team members; we know who they are and what they look like and talk to them every day

Our stakeholders are really interested in the work we’re doing

We always have tests before we start work, even if they’re manual

We’ve captured knowledge about how to deploy our code to production

Agile is a lot of fun

Knowledgeable

We are going to come well within our deadline

Sometimes we invite our CEO to our show-and-tell, so he can see what Agile looks like done well

People applaud at the end of the show-and-tell; everyone is very happy

That screen shows the offshore team working; we can talk to them any time; they can see us too

We hold retrospectives to celebrate what we learnt

We challenge our coach and change our practices to help us deliver better

We run the tests before we start work – even the manual tests, to see what’s broken and know what will be different when we’re done

Agile is applicable to more than just software delivery

Expert

We go to conferences and talk about our fantastic Agile experiences

We are helping other teams go Agile

Business outside of IT are really interested in what we’re doing

We regularly revisit our practices, and look at other teams to see what they’re doing